Another sad one today, unfortunately. Back in July, Polyarc released Moss: The Forgotten Relic, a new version of the original two games combined together that ditched its VR headset origins. Now, unfortunately, it sounds like the studio is shutting down, as the developer's LinkedIn page shared a message this week noting it's ending "active development."

Read more

The beautiful thing about people that like dungeon crawlers is that they're all sickos. Every single one of them! This is not a genre that's for the faint of heart. It is often plodding and methodical and conniving, so focused on stats and character classes that you could drown in the amount of numbers you have to pay attention to. So, how about a dungeon crawler where the battling happens automatically, and all you have to do is a little bit of programming? It's called Dungeon Automata, and trust me, the programming isn't as bad as it sounds.

Read more

There are probably many jokes one could make about mushrooms being edible, and mushrooms being like, edible, man in relation to Shroom and Gloom, a positively mycelial roguelike deckbuilder where you roam spore-filled dungeons with two decks of cards in tow. I won't do that though because that would mean having to think of them, and like Edwin before me, I just don't have it in me. What I do have is the ability to tell you about Shroom and Gloom, which is out in early access today.

Read more

Today marks yet another day in reporting on layoffs that have occurred in the games industry over the past several years, with this occasion unfortunately being GNOG and Goodbye Volcano High developer KO_OP. The studio shared word that 13 staffers were being laid off less than two weeks after the launch of the studio's latest game, Young Suns, explaining the process by which this took place in a statement that provides an example of what should really be just the bare minimum in these situations.

Read more

In this IP-obsessed world, it is quite easy to wonder if anything will ever actually come to an end. Theoretically, the Final Fantasy 7 trilogy of remakes will be coming to an end next year with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. Except that might not even be true because a couple of pieces of DLC, about Sephiroth and Vincent Valentine respectively, are also in the works, so who knows when the actual end date is. Whether this is actually the end of Final Fantasy 7 or not, however, doesn't matter, as its director is treating it that way.

Read more

I remember once when I was a child, my uncle was visiting and completely unprompted (and kindly) he gave me a copy of one of the Total War games, I think the Rome one, you'll have to forgive my memory. I'd literally never played a strategy game in my life, but I gave it a go anyway, and quickly found myself thinking, "hey, where are the collectibles? Why's there no triple jump?" The onboarding process did not help me much, and after a failure of a battle where I lost everything, I soon gave up after. So it's because of not particularly strategic people like me that makes me understand why developer Creative Assembly want Total War: Warhammer 40,000 "approachable and accessible".

Read more

Truth be told, I'm still not sold on "bullet heaven" as a genre. Name notwithstanding, the genre is certainly here to stay, and there always seems to be funny new takes on it despite the fact that Vampire Survivors did kind of start it off without much room for improvement. While I'm not sure if Wanderburg is an improvement (I haven't played it yet), I do conceptually like its approach being to hand you a modular medieval castle tank that can suck up sheep and blast cannon fire at your enemies. And it's out today in early access!

Read more

I find it to be quite rare that when a game says it has a graphic novel art style that it actually has one. There's often just something that reads as slightly off, like it's not quite cut from the same cloth. I'm happy to say that isn't the case with Stack Order, a deckbuilding roguelike with a story all about layering your cards just right to maximise their effects that looks like you could find it in a hip and trendy French comic book shop.

Read more

Is Katamari Damacy an evil game? I realised as soon as I wrote the heading for this one that calling one game an evil version of Katamari might not be quite right, given the level of destruction you can enact in that series. Perhaps we're getting into an ontological argument there, so I'm going to move past it and properly introduce you to ROLLA, a game where you play as a mobile mass of flesh that seeks to wreak havoc upon the world by rolling around and destroying everything.

Read more

"Low-poly dogs!" I hear you chant in the distance. "Low-poly dogs!" The war cry gets louder. "Low-poly dogs!" It's inescapable now, the low-poly dogs requested by the masses are here… Or, well, in the digital world of Old School RuneScape at the very least, as Jagex have added in a new members-only quest that allows you to pick up your very own puppy.

Read more

It's another one of those layoff days, unfortunately. This time the studio in question is PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab, who have laid off seven staff members with little fanfare after cancelling a project that has been in development for several years.

Read more

I can take or leave a majority of Death Stranding's story (BB forever, though), but I gotta give it to Kojima: delivering stuff is fun. There's a genuine complexity to the process of deciding what to pack and how you pack it, making the simple act of delivering something like a pizza legitimately challenging. So I'm quite tickled by the look of Pinetrail, a much less apocalyptic delivery game where you drive a tiny three-wheel rickshaw truck transporting packages across luscious forests and mountains.

Read more

Do I need to explain how Cyclops from the X-Men's powers work? I'm going to anyway just in case. He shoots beams from his eyes! More or less, I think it's technically energy from a punch dimension? I'm not an X-Men nerd though, so correct me in the comments. Main point is, he can never stop shooting those beams, which is why he has to always be wearing glasses at the very least. Which, as it turns out, makes for a fun video game concept, as it's now been manifested in the form of Laser Guy, a twin-stick "anti-shooter" all about not killing your co-workers.

Read more

My only experience of Left 4 Dead 2 is a handful of sessions in my youth where a friend handed me a controller (me, a person whose shooter experience extended to Ratchet and Clank at the time), told me nothing, and let the chaos unfold. I did not do a good job. But it left a lasting impression! Though perhaps that impression would have changed had I seen its cinematic trailer as soon as Valve had wanted to release it. The problem was, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board weren't so hot on the game, including its marketing materials, so that left Valve with one option: leaking the trailer themselves.

Read more

It's been a couple of months since Double Fine parted ways from Xbox, and they've been busy getting to work since that split. There's that game jam Kickstarter they recently launched that has Brutal Legend 2 as a stretch goal (just ignore the fact that stretch goal is $100 million). And now, the once again indie studio has announced their first game post-Xbox: Thank You Bus Driver, a very silly job sim where you drive passengers to their destinations, and slap them if they break the rules.

Read more

Another week, another Mortal Shell 2 update! The first proper one arrived a week ago, and smoothed down some of the game's rough edges to make for a (slightly) more generous experience. This next update brings with it a bevy of changes, but most notably is an experimental adaptive difficulty mode that changes depending how well you're doing.

Read more

A problem that games have, I find, is that it's quite hard for them to inspire a sense of wonder. The kind of thing that old movies, before CGI, that would make you think, "how did they do that?" But games are all CGI, spiritually anyway, so it's a bit harder for the craft itself to truly wow in terms of not being able to comprehend how something works. However! I felt that today when I saw the reveal trailer for Uncanyon, a puzzle game from the devs behind Maquette set in the seam between unparallel realities where the very shape of the world is constantly in flux.

Read more

You like putting a bunch of mice on a boat, don't you? Of course you do, it's always enjoyable seeing semi-anthropomorphic mice do human things! Now that we're on the same page, this is a good time to let you know that the new update for Whiskerwood, a city-builder where the cities are filled with mice ruled by nasty, greedy cats, has received a new update today where the friendly rodents can venture out to sail the seven seas.

Read more

Both the original and Dragon's Dogma 2 are not games for everyone. Not in the Dark Souls, uber challenging sort of way necessarily, just in that they do not hold your hand, right down to not even having a lock-on feature in combat. There's a long list of other aspects that provide friction, interesting friction, that make the games so beloved. At least, they're beloved in the West, because folks over in the RPG's home country of Japan have a different perspective, a difference its devs find difficult to balance.

Read more